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The Solus 4.1 operating system has been released as refreshed installation medium for all supported flavors, adding new features, improvements, and updated components.
The second installment in the Solus 4 “Fortitude” series, Solus 4.1 arrives 10 months after the Solus 4.0 release to add support for the Zstandard (zstd) compression standard for the SquashFS images, which makes the installation process a lot faster.
“In most cases, you can expect to spend more time filling out the questions in the installation wizard than it will actually take to copy everything to disk. We hope you are just as surprised as we were at just how fast this process has become,” said lead developer Joshua Strobl.
This release also enables ESync support to improve gaming, faster AV1 decoding with FFmpeg 4.2.2, and new networking features with NetworkManager 1.22.4, including WPA3-Personal (SAE) support.
Available as Budgie, GNOME, MATE, and KDE editions
Solus 4.1 ships with all four official editions, including Budgie, GNOME, MATE, and KDE Plasma. Each edition updates the default desktop environment to the latest available release, such as Budgie 10.5.1, GNOME 3.34.3, MATE 1.22, and KDE Plasma 5.17.5.
Under the hood, all four editions are using the Linux 5.4.12 kernel, which adds support for newer AMD Radeon RX GPUs, 3rd generation AMD Ryzen processors, Intel Comet Lake and Ice Lake CPUs, and Nvidia graphics cards. OpenGL 4.6 support is present as well for supported GPUs through the Mesa 19.3.2 graphics stack.
Among the updated components, there’s the Mozilla Firefox 72.0.2 web browser, Mozilla Thunderbird 68.4.1 email and news client, LibreOffice 6.3.4.2 office suite, systemd 2.4.4 init system, Brisk Menu 0.6.1 applications menu implementation, GStreamer 1.16.2 multimedia framework, as well as the KDE Frameworks 5.66 and KDE Applications 19.12.1 software suits.
Also improved in Solus 4.1 is the in-house built ahead-of-timer compiler for AppArmor profiles, aa-lsm-hook, which should now fix launch issues of Snap apps.
“During this release cycle,
aa-lsm-hookwas completely rewritten in Go for simplicity and long-term maintenance, as well as enabling us to support newer versions of AppArmor which have changed cache directory locations,“ Joshua Strobl explained.
The new ISO images are recommended only to those who want to install the Linux-based operating system on their personal computers. Existing Solus 4 users need only to updated their installations to receive the new goodies, thanks to the rolling release model.
Source: Solus
Last updated 4 years ago
